Principal Data Engineer - in Devon, Plymouth

That's someone that does the right thing, is enthusiastic and motivated to grow, believes in Community spirit, is respectful and enjoys their work. As the UK's leading Social Enterprise, we don't discriminate based on any protected attribute. In fact, we're dedicated to creating inclusive and thriving Communities for both our Customers and Employees. Join a Community that cares about you!

The Data and Platform Engineering team are the foundation for the Data Office function. Responsible for designing, building, and maintaining PfP's data platform we extract data from source, transform it into a usable format, load it into consumer models and marts and build and manage the infrastructure to do all this work.

Data Engineering are transforming the way PfP consumes data. This is an exciting time to join a growing business function, with the opportunity to make your mark in the architecture of the platform and the development of the data engineering function.

The Principal Data Engineer is a senior technical leader who drives the engineering strategy, architecture, and best practices across product domain squads. This role is pivotal in enabling decentralised data ownership while ensuring consistency, scalability, and interoperability across the data mesh.

Mentorship and capability building

With a solid understanding of Google Cloud Platform, the Principal Data Engineer is responsible for ensuring that the design and build of all data processes on the data platform are robust, performant, and compliant. This includes data ingestion, data quality / integrity, transformation, security and encryption, batch management, monitoring, alerting and cost control.

In addition to leading data processing, the Principal Data Engineer will help design and build the Data Mesh including data modelling and the processing of data from raw through the semantic layers.

The Principal Data Engineer will identify opportunities for automation and process improvement, coach and mentor data engineers, set coding standards and best practices, implement and document data integrity and quality checks, optimise queries, and facilitate data engineering collaboration across the team.

The Principal Data Engineer will work hand in glove with the Principal Data Platform Engineer and the Data Domain Architect to ensure that the data platform and data pipeline design is optimised and reliable within Google Cloud Platform, documenting the approach and explaining the solution to engineers and non-technical business users.

You will have an extensive cloud data engineering background with deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms and modern data stacks. Having worked on multiple projects within the cloud you have hands-on experience in many of the tools and technologies on offer, and you embrace and learn new technologies quickly.

You have a very clear view of what good looks like and can formulate plans to deliver a target state working closely with managers and engineers to deliver that vision.

You will have multiple years' experience working in GCP with good knowledge across the platform and deep knowledge in core processing and orchestration products such as Big Query, Data Flow, Data Fusion, Data Stream, Cloud Functions, Data Proc and Airflow / Composer.

You will be able to manage and participate in the full development lifecycle of data products.

You will have held a leading role in a Data Engineering function with responsibility for directing the efforts of other data engineers through the design, build and deployment of complex data solutions. This includes driving the implementation and adoption of CI / CD.

You will be self-motivated with excellent leadership qualities, capable of driving innovation and mentoring data engineers.

A proven track record within Data Engineering, experience in a Lead / Principal Engineer role, experience in a cloud data platform experience, strong understanding of Data Mesh principles (direct experience beneficial), extensive experience with Data Lake / Warehouse solutions, strong understanding of Data Governance including Data Dictionaries, MDM, Lineage, Data Legislation, and the handling of PII, experience of Agile / Scrum / SDLC.

We know that there's always more we can do to make you smile, that's why we offer a comprehensive benefits package with each role, yours will include:

• Competitive salary, with a salary review yearly
• Excellent holiday package 35 days annual leave with the option to buy or sell leave
• A bonus scheme for all colleagues at 2%
• Training and development
• Extra perks including huge discounts and offers from shops, cinemas and much more.

As part of our commitment to diversity and inclusion, we offer a guaranteed interview to candidates who are disabled, neurodiverse, or have served in the Armed Forces, provided they meet the essential criteria for the role. We understand the importance of a supportive and inclusive work culture so please talk to us at interview about flexibility you may need. For this role we are open to discussing the possibility of reduced hours, flexible start and finish times or compressed hours.

We are committed to creating safe communities for our customers and colleagues by protecting children, young people, and adults at risk from harm, abuse, and neglect. We follow robust safeguarding policies and procedures, ensuring all employees, volunteers, and contractors uphold the highest standards of safeguarding and accountability. Our recruitment process includes pre-employment checks, including Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) checks where applicable, to promote a safe and secure working environment. By joining Places for People, you are expected to contribute to our safeguarding culture, following our policies and reporting concerns to protect those in our communities.